Amazeballs

Zero Day is a Netflix miniseries released on February 20, 2025, positioning itself within the political thriller genre with a contemporary, cyber-oriented narrative. Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt, and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, the series explores the aftermath of a devastating nationwide cyberattack that results in mass casualties and widespread chaos. The series seeks to intertwine themes of political power, personal trauma, and societal paranoia, all set within a framework that aims to reflect timely concerns about cyber warfare, disinformation, and governmental conspiracy. Despite its ambitious premise and high-profile cast led by Robert De Niro, the series ultimately struggles to translate its ideas into a cohesive and impactful narrative.

There’s something very contemporary about Companion, that sense of ordinary people, lacquered in anxiety, stumbling into catastrophe by way of a Silicon Valley fever dream. Drew Hancock, no hack, has made a movie that wants to stare at the icy void where technology and human vanity collide, then crack a joke so the void doesn’t stare back too hard. It’s a science fiction thriller in horror makeup, but with the nervous giggle of a dinner party gone off the rails.

“Lifeline” is the kind of taut, haunted psychological drama that feels like it’s been mistakenly shipped to the Science Fiction shelf by a jittery intern, where it sits in the company of time-travelers and androids, looking around, appalled at the company it keeps. The film, directed by Feras Alfuqaha, has the brooding nerve to face the black and blue marks left by trauma, personal and societal, and invites you to press your thumb to the bruise. To call it science fiction is to miss the point with the earnestness only a certain kind of literalist can muster. The tricks with reality, disorienting, elliptical, aren’t flights to the moon but dives into a mind coming apart, or maybe clawing for unity in the first place. “Lifeline” wants not just to test its protagonist, Steven Thomas (played with a wonderful, agitated delicacy by Josh Stewart), but to prod at the audience’s own nerves, the little lingering doubts and regrets we all ferry around. There’s a current of self-examination running through this film that curls right back into the viewer’s lap, whether we like it or not.

It would be generous to call Red Sparrow a thriller in the classic sense—what Francis Lawrence has delivered is more of a stylish fever dream of espionage, its patchwork of betrayals pinned together with body blows and performances that shiver with self-awareness. Emerging from the current Hollywood fixation on shadow governments and the bruised souls who serve them, Red Sparrow strives for the sophistication of le Carré but gives us the lurid pulps of a post-Snowden universe instead: sex as weapon, trust as currency, trauma as curriculum vitae.

September 5 arrives on the screen as an urgent, bracing slab of historical drama—a kind of fevered docudrama pitched somewhere between the fretful hum of a 1970s control room and the icy dread pressing in from the world outside. Tim Fehlbaum’s direction plunges us into the back corridors of catastrophe: the Munich massacre at the '72 Olympics is no longer simply a horror recalled, but a media spectacle in real-time, filtered through the sweating brows and moral agonies of ABC Sports. Not since Lumet thrust us behind the cameras in Network have we felt the pulse of crisis with such claustrophobic vitality—and with almost as much queasy self-examination.

WarGames belongs to that rare class of Hollywood entertainments that seem, almost accidentally, to have tapped straight into the anxieties—and hopes—of an entire era. John Badham’s 1983 techno-thriller opens in a haze of early computer geekery: modems squeal, dot-matrix printers grind, and a Seattle teenager named David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) sits hunched over his blue-glowing screen. Within minutes, what begins as an innocent search for a few pirated video games erupts into a pulse-cranking race against nuclear oblivion—a transformation so swift and seamless it’s as if the movie itself is racing the clock.